By Tony Hicks
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 1:34 pm in Uncategorized.

I’d already had the obligatory Corey Haim discussion this morning before my colleague Laura Casey came in. So when she sat down across from me, fired up her computer, and made a startled noise upon discovering Corey Haim was dead, I made a couple mean jokes. Because, as many of you know, I’m insensitive.

Then Laura, who’s about a decade younger than me, therefore wasn’t a sneering 20-year-old rocker who thought he was tremendously cool when Corey Haim was a god to teen girls, pointed out that he was her first celebrity crush. She was a bit upset about what I saw as an inevitable ugly death of someone I never cared for.

I get it – I remember my first celebrity crush (Jan Brady who – despite popular myth – was much hotter than Marcia in the Brady Bunch’s last season). I misted up a little bit for Michael Jackson. Not for the adult who’d gone off the tracks, but the kid singer I loved when I was a kid.

And “Lucas” really was a good movie. In fact, my wife and I were in Petaluma last weekend, and drove by one of the houses in the movie.

So – because I’m incapable of writing a Corey Haim appreciation on my own – and I wanted to say sorry to Laura for being an insensitive ass – I told her to write up a little tribute and I’d put it on the blog:

Corey Haim was my first celebrity crush. I remember his was the first poster to go on my wall and I kissed it so much, the paper was worn away on his lips. I watched most of his movies and enjoyed him as an actor and a hunk. I was 11 when License to Drive came out and I made a point to catch it in the theater. Not the best movie in the world, but something about him made me feel like I knew him or could know him at some point in my life.
I guess his death bothers me so much because, first, it’s the death of that innocent crush I had on him — the death of all those teeny bopper magazines I bought with his face on the cover.
It’s also a predictable ending to what could have a bright life that was ruined by drugs which, later in life, appeared to be a mask for mental illness and childhood sexual abuse. For some reason, I kept up on news stories and YouTube videos of him, most of which showed a depressed and depressing man. I felt sad for him.
It’s been years since I thought he’d restart his career, but I always hoped something good would happen for him. Maybe he’d find sobriety, or get married, or land that movie that didn’t totally suck. Now that he’s dead, it’s a sad ending to a very long, sad tale.